


Twisted Wreckage Left Behind

by atlanticslide



Category: As the World Turns
Genre: M/M, Natural Disasters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-01
Updated: 2011-04-01
Packaged: 2017-10-17 10:29:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/175903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlanticslide/pseuds/atlanticslide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Storm’s coming.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twisted Wreckage Left Behind

**Author's Note:**

> Written originally for the LuRe Santa fic exchange, reposted.  
> Disclaimer: _As The World Turns_ and its characters are owned by CBS, Christopher Goutman, and a whole lot of other people who aren't me.

There was a hurricane once in Dallas. Actually, Dallas is too far inland - by the time it hit the city, Hurricane Patty had become Tropical Storm Patty, and they got them every year. This one was particularly bad, though, the worst Reid had seen since he’d moved to the city. There was a constant stream of patients for days; Reid ended up working the ER, a job he normally hated being saddled with yet found strength in the chaos of while the storms raged outside of the hospital. Everyone was on call that weekend, but Reid watched in muted irritation as several of his fellow staff-members ducked out as the rains eased up - _have to make sure my family’s okay_ , each of them had confessed in some variation as they slipped past the patients they were leaving behind, out into the storm. _Just be careful, and get back here asap_ , their Chief of Staff had called after them, and they all did. Reid still didn’t get it.

He does now.

There’s been threats of tornados throughout the area for days. Luke had watched the sky growing quietly angry that morning while Reid had dragged his lips across Luke’s bare shoulders and tried to coax him back to bed for a few more minutes.

“Storm’s coming,” Luke had replied to Reid’s touches. “Maybe a tornado. Been all over the news the past couple days.”

“And by news, you mean the Weather Channel,” Reid breathed into Luke’s skin. Luke shrugged, continued to watch the sky. “Dork,” Reid had said affectionately, and kissed behind Luke’s ear.

Reid had gone off to work shortly thereafter, Luke to his grandmother’s farmhouse to have breakfast with his family despite Reid’s teasing, “What about the twister?” because he’d never really thought much about tornados - never lived in a place where they might be a reality. Luke hadn’t seemed to hear him; just got in his car and drove off in the other direction, away from Reid.

The first one touches down early in the afternoon, just as Reid is finishing up his rounds. A siren wails throughout the city, and everyone starts rushing around him while Reid continues to stand in the middle of the hallway, clipboard in hand, saying, “Seriously?”

It’s a long way off from Memorial, so they don’t even hear any rumblings, but every department is told to prepare for incoming patients. Everyone is on call. It’s their own calm before the storm: hallways empty save a nurse or a doctor here and there running to deliver some piece of equipment somewhere else, patients squared away in their rooms, cafeteria closed. Reid pulls out his cell, checks to see if Luke has called. He hasn’t. Reid grumbles to himself and scrolls through his contact list to Luke’s name, listens as the call goes straight to voicemail. It should concern him, but more so it annoys him that Luke isn’t answering.

The first flood of patients streams in a short time later, and Reid is immediately put to work - a construction worker hit with a two-by-four, brought in unconscious; an elementary school teacher who’d parked his car in the lot and ended up in the school’s gym before he’d been able to get out of it, babbling incoherently but awake; a teenage girl who looks a bit like Luke’s sister Faith, but isn’t, banged up by flying debris in a supermarket, mostly coherent but pupils dilated abnormally.

He calls Luke again after the girl. He’s certain that Luke is fine, but he just wants to make sure. He just wants to check on the rest of the family. He’s sure it’s no big deal that Luke still isn’t answering his phone - might be something wrong with the cell phone towers in the area, except that Katie calls from her cell a few minutes later, her voice edging on frantic but still in control once they talk and reassure themselves that they’re both okay.

Reid calls the Walsh house line. It rings exactly six times before the answering machine picks up, a sickeningly-sweet message in Ethan’s babyish voice asking him to leave his name and number after the beep.

“Luke, call me at the hospital or on my cell,” Reid says to the machine, short and perfunctory, and hangs up quickly when he remembers that Luke was headed to the farm. There’s no answer there either, just endless ringing, and Reid won’t let himself worry. Not yet.

Three more calls to Luke’s phone, four more to the farmhouse, and then Reid has to go into surgery with an ache in his gut and fabricated images of Luke lying trapped somewhere, scared and cold and bleeding, warring with his plan of attack for treating this patient’s brain.

The power goes out midway through relieving the increasing pressure in the patient’s head, and Reid breathes out an irritated, “Shit,” while he counts the seconds until the emergency generator will kick in.

“Another tornado,” someone brings the news just as the power comes back on, and now Reid will admit that he’s growing nervous.

“Nurse, um…” he glances up, but can’t place a name to the face. “Whatever your name is. Get me the phone.”

The nurse glares at him over her surgical mask, but does as instructed. Reid rattles off Luke’s number automatically, has her dial for him and then hold the receiver up to his ear while he dissects a piece of the patient’s skull.

_Hey this is Luke, leave me a message and I’ll get back to you. Thanks!_

Reid is sure that the nurse holding the phone for him can hear Luke’s chipper voicemail, and he ignores her smiling eyes, his focus on the brain in front of him.

“Listen to me, you little shit, call me back _now._ ” The nurse glares at him again, but he’ll worry about being an asshole later, once he knows that Luke is safe. He nods at the nurse to take the phone away.

An hour goes by and the balance in Reid’s attention between his patient and Luke teeters back and forth. He’s never lost focus on his work before, and he’s not quite sure what to make of this, but he’s pretty sure of what he has to do.

He finishes up, sends the patient off to recovery, and makes his decision.

He gets it now. He hates to leave work when there’s still work to be done and maybe later he’ll be annoyed with himself, shake his head in disbelief the way he does at other doctors when they act like numskulls. But he gets it now, what it’s like to be a doctor with a personal life - he’s never really had this before, and couldn’t ever relate to a need to balance work with family; to perhaps occasionally even put family before work, even if that might come at the expense of helping a patient.

“Gotta go,” he tells the admin nurse on his floor as he peels off his scrubs top. “I’ll be back soon. Have to make sure my family’s okay.”

And he’d punch himself in the face for that, but the truth is that Luke’s family has become, by extension, Reid’s as well, even if he thinks half of them are completely nuts and most of them haven’t exactly warmed to him just yet.

There’s chaos in the streets - not much in the way of debris around the hospital, but traffic backed up for miles. Reid groans as he pulls his car out of the garage and onto the street. At least most of the traffic is headed in the other direction, so he can move along at a slow crawl instead of not at all, but frustration bubbles up in him quickly, easily, his fingers near clawing at the steering wheel.

He tries Luke’s phone again, which only serves to irritate him more.

Halfway to the farmhouse he finds the tornado’s trail, laid out before him across the road as if leading him onwards, and his whole body goes cold. Tree branches scatter where they shouldn’t, cars parked half-on-half-off of sidewalks, a family sits bleeding, looking dazed by the side of the road. Reid grumbles to himself and stops his car, grabs his emergency kit from the trunk, and trots over to them. The father looks up at him as if seeing a vision. A little boy stops his snuffling cries when Reid offers him a pat on the head. They’re fine, more or less, more panicked than hurt. He presses an icepack to the mother’s head, hurriedly wraps gauze around the father’s bloodied arm, barks out instructions for them to get inside somewhere, wait for emergency services, don’t try to drive anywhere, and then he’s off back to his car and back on the road, dodging bits of trees and abandoned cars along the way.

He leaves his car somewhere around five miles from the farmhouse, unable to inch forward any closer amongst the twisted trees and throngs of bottlenecked vehicles around him. He starts at a run, desperation and fear upping his adrenaline and driving his legs forward, but spots a bicycle lying in a driveway after a few paces, and spares only a moment’s consideration on its owners.

It’s like something out of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie; he’s off winding his way through the holes in traffic and ducking tree limbs on a stolen bike, but he can’t bring himself to laugh at the absurdity of all this when the clutter amongst the road grows ever larger, more daunting, the closer he gets to the farm. Luke could be anywhere right now - he could be at his mom’s house, he could be on his way to the hospital, maybe there’s a storm shelter somewhere on the farm, they could all be in there. He could be trapped somewhere beneath rubble. He could be bleeding to death. He could be dead already. Reid’s insides feel near frantic, helpless, nothing he can do put push on while he manages to keep himself outwardly steady and determined.

The bike is ditched up the road from the farmhouse, too much crap in his way to make it worth it. Easier now to just run, and his heart, hammering away in his chest as if it might fly right out, is making him too anxious to stay perched on top of an old Huffy anyway.

He stops short as half of the farmhouse comes into view. The other half is a wreck of wooden boards, torn up porcelain and pipes and whatever other pieces once made up a whole house. A million things flit through Reid’s mind unbidden, foremost what he’ll do without Luke. His heart hurts. He might as well just lay down.

Everything is still and silent for a long, agonizing moment as Reid stares uncomprehending. He’s never been frozen in place like this, certainly not ever in an emergency, but this is a day of firsts. He can’t move.

Until a creak from the house betrays the crash that follows, and one floor folds into another, and somehow that spurs Reid forward, picking his way over scattered shingles and tree branches. He shovels debris aside, tosses boards and kicks at glass and kids’ toys. He recognizes one of Ethan’s dolls and his stomach twists.

The house is unstable, could collapse altogether at any moment, so he calls out, “Hello?” before trying to go in, listens to the word bounce off of the wreckage, muffled fast in the cluttered debris. There’s noise from the direction of the barn and none that sounds human from the house, so Reid spares it a final once-over before turning on his heel and dashing off in the other direction.

And that’s where Reid finds him. Standing in the midst of a wood pile, shirt torn and arms full of broken off branches, alive and sweaty and beautiful and perfect, is Luke. He glances up to spot Reid at about the same moment Reid sees him, and they both stop in their tracks for all of a moment, breathing hard and staring.

“I left my phone in the house,” is the first thing Luke says as he drops the branches in his hands and Reid stumbles forward towards him. Luke picks his way out of the wood pile, trips and falls once, then struggles on his feet to run towards Reid. “I think it got crushed,” he says, and Reid’s pace picks up to a sprint. They meet in the middle in a crushing, winding embrace, hands and fingers digging everywhere and if Reid could wrap both his legs around Luke as well, he would.

He’d thought Luke was dead. For at least a full minute, when he saw that broken up house and was sure that Luke had been inside, he’d really thought Luke was dead. It scares him more than he’d like, both the idea of losing Luke and what it might do to him.

“Don’t ever,” he breathes harshly into Luke’s neck. “Don’t you _ever_ , ever, don’t _ever_.” _Do that to me again. Die. Leave me._ He’s not even sure how to finish, but it could be any one of those or all of them. Luke gets it though. He always does.

“I won’t,” Luke whispers back, his chin pressed against Reid’s shoulder. “I won’t, I won’t, I’m sorry, it’s okay, I’m alright, I’m fine.” Soothing nonsense meant to reassure, but it does nothing compared to the feel of Luke’s body pressed to his own, Luke’s warmth against him, Luke’s breath on his face.

He’ll never know what makes his penis chose _this_ moment to grow hard, but before he realizes what he’s doing, he’s peppering Luke’s face with kisses, dragging his lips over Luke’s collarbone, ignoring the smudges of dirt on Luke’s neck as his tongue flicks over and over the same sport where he can feel Luke’s pulse.

“Where is - ” he starts to ask, only to get sidetracked by Luke’s earlobe.

“Natalie got a few scrapes on her arm,” Luke breathes out in reply to the unfinished question. “Mom banged her head. Dad and Grandma took them to the hospital. Took Ethan too. Faith’s with Parker, at Jack and Carly’s. Everyone’s okay,” in reply to the unasked one. His hands fist in Reid’s hair and his chin tips up, breath puffing out.

So they’re alone here. Which is good, because Reid’s never felt quite so desperate to have someone _right the fuck now,_ so much so that he’d probably be stripping Luke bare in front of his whole damn family if they were here. It’s inappropriate and crazy as fuck considering the beating the whole town has just taken, and he needs to get back to the hospital, but he’s just so damn glad that Luke is safe and alright and Luke seems just as desperate to prove his life as Reid, so he lets Reid push him against the side of the barn, thankfully still standing strong and seemingly untouched somehow.

Reid claws at Luke’s shirt, pushes it just enough out of the way so that he can press his face against Luke’s chest, nose at the hair there and lick briefly across one nipple, then down to his navel. Luke cards his fingers through Reid’s hair softly at first, then tugging insistently for Reid to return to eye-level so that they can press their lips together, lick into each other’s mouths, groan deeply into one another.

Buttons, zippers are done away with frantically, underwear pushed aside so they can press together and feel one another as closely as possible. Luke whimpers and pulls his mouth from Reid’s, and Reid uses the opportunity to lick his own hand quickly and then run it over both of their cocks, slicking their now fully hardened erections.

“Reid,” Luke breathes out, almost like a reflex, as he stares at Reid with wide eyes. Reid kisses him again, tugs at Luke’s lower lip with his teeth. They press against each other, not enough skin-on-skin with most of their clothing still intact to fully satisfy him, but the thrill of Luke’s cock against Reid’s is enough for the moment.

It’s perhaps the most ridiculous way he’s ever gotten off - grunting and pressing and tugging in a heap of broken bits of trees and house and laughable thoughts of _It’s a twister! It’s a twister!_ still ringing in his ears - but Luke’s warm, breathing body feels so fucking good against him that it doesn’t take long. They’re both thrusting desperately, each occasionally reaching down to add the twist of a hand, the stroke of fingers to the mix, while pressing open-mouthed kisses everywhere they each can reach, their names breathed in the crevasses between.

“Love you, love you,” Luke says softly as he thrusts and spills against Reid. Reid can’t say it right now, but he knows that Luke knows it, and he buries his face against Luke’s neck as he follows soon after.

Luke watches him cautiously as they pull apart, readjust their clothes.

“You okay?” he asks with a hand on Reid’s cheek. Reid looks up at him, flashes a smile and leans into the touch.

“Good now,” he replies and gives Luke a quick pat on the cheek, followed by a kiss to the side of Luke’s mouth, then the bridge of his nose, then the corner of his eye, and before he knows it they’re back in each other’s embrace once more.

He’ll get back to the hospital, back to his job, soon. The scale will tip back over to his patients. He’ll be able to work, secure in the knowledge that his family is safe. Just as soon as he can bring himself to pull away.

**-end-**


End file.
